Jaden Gleiber

High Point University

ENG 1103-24

Final Reflection

Once we were assigned the Final Essay and Annotated Bibliography in class I got pretty nervous and stressed out as I normally do when getting big assignments. Writing and reading are not my strongest suit but when I learned that we could work in groups of no more than four people, I knew everything was going to be alright because I will have people that I can think through my ideas with. 

While working in a group with Sean, Josh, and Chris, we collaboratively decided that splitting the amount of work evenly was the best way to do it. We had done the math and realized that a paper with a minimum of 1800 words split up between four people would mean that each person would have to write 450 words and each person would find one source to back up our thesis. This made things a tiny bit less stressful for me as I hoped everyone would do their part and if so, we would have a good paper. Of course, it was a bit difficult for me to do my part as I was not planning on getting the flu, but we all did our part and I thought the paper came out pretty well. I believe we all helped one another and looked out for each other especially when I was sick they cared for me and were respectful of each other’s ideas. This hard work and excellent group work ethic, I believe really helped make the paper as good as it was. I consider the strongest part of the paper and annotated bibliography to be the way in which I used my source and factual evidence to back up the thesis.  

Although the paper turned out how I imagined it to, and we were able to decide on our topic relatively fast, there were some small bumps and challenges along the way. As we had split up what each group member talked about I had chosen to do “how technology affects college students academically” whereas the others did socially, mentally, and physically. In researching sources for my topic, I found it very difficult to find good and reliable sources in HPU Libraries Guide. However, I finally found one after a while and thought it really helped back up our thesis. 

As stated in Rosenwasser and Stephens, “Writing Analytically”   textbook, I learned that it is important to never let what I was citing stand on its own and that a rule of thumb is to use quotations. This led me to realize that when I was using information from the source, I had to quote it and cite it or else it would be plagiarism or the reader would not know when I was doing so. I always made sure my information was cited but it was a bit difficult at times as I didn’t know what to exactly cite.  Other than that, I found the writing process to be quite smooth and I really enjoyed working with this group. 

Work Cited

 Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Integrating Quotations into Your Paper.” Writing

Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 231-33.